pers and circulars in
wrappers lying on the table. One is a dingy book catalogue; the second
is a shiny pamphlet about petrol; the third is a paper called The
Christian Commonwealth. He opens it anyhow, and sees in the middle of a
page a sentence with which he honestly disagrees. It says that the sense
of beauty in Nature is a new thing, hardly felt before Wordsworth. A
stream of images and pictures pour through his head, like skies chasing
each other or forests running by. "Not felt before Wordsworth!" he
thinks. "Oh, but this won't do... bare ruined choirs where late the
sweet birds sang... night's candles are burnt out... glowed with living
sapphires... leaving their moon-loved maze... antique roots fantastic...
antique roots wreathed high... what is it in As You Like It?"

He sits down desperately; the messenger rings at the bell; the children
drum on the door; the servants run up from time to time to say the
messenger is getting bored; and the pencil staggers along, making
the world a present of fifteen hundred unimportant words, and making
Shakespeare a present of a portion of Gray's Elegy; putting "fantastic
roots wreathed high" instead of "antique roots peep out." Then the
journalist sends off his copy and turns his attention to the enigma
of whether a brother should commandeer a sister's necklace because the
sister pinched him at Littlehampton. That is the first scene; that is
how an article is really written.

The scene now changes to the newspaper office. The writer of the article
has discovered his mistake and wants to correct it by the next day:
but the next day is Sunday. He cannot post a letter, so he rings up the
paper and dictates a letter by telephone. He leaves the title to his
friends at the other end; he knows that they can spell "Gray," as no
doubt they can: but the letter is put down by journalistic custom in a
pencil scribble and the vowel may well be doubtful. The friend writes
at the top of the letter "'G. K. C.' Explains," putting the initials in
quotation marks. The next man passing it for press is bored with these
initials (I am with him there) and crosses them out, substituting with
austere civility, "Mr. Chesterton Explains." But and now he hears
the iron laughter of the Fates, for the blind bolt is about to
fall—but he neglects to cross out the second "quote" (as we call
it) and it goes up to press with a "quote" between the last words.
Another quotation mark at the end of "explain